Specimen Spotlight

Although the coronavirus pandemic has turned our worlds upside down, it’s important for you to land on your feet. We want to help. If you work in a medical research organization, you may have or slowed or paused projects because of social distancing, or you may have pivoted to accelerate work on coronavirus treatments, tests or vaccines.

When research is on hold, so, in some cases, are patients’ hopes for relief. That’s why it’s important to remember that even if you, as a researcher, are separated from your work, you can continue valuable activities in the background, e.g., project design, planning and preparation.

Although January is just another month and the 2020s are just another decade, big changes in the calendar give us pause. As another year unfolds, I marvel at how far biomedical research has come and where it will take us in the next year and beyond.

Veteran health care informatics expert Benjamin Bielak recently joined iSpecimen as its first Chief Information Officer. He is the subject of our latest Q&A… 1. The iSpecimen Marketplace is often compared to eBay or Amazon for clarity, but it’s certainly more complicated than that. What are the biggest technology challenges of an online marketplace not…

A disease is an abnormal condition, and to fully understand it, you need to compare abnormal biology against the normal. That’s the concept behind the matched sets of human biospecimens that we provide to researchers around the world.

September Specimen Spotlight There are two ways for research organizations to procure human biospecimens, broadly speaking: Order them from existing inventories. Have them collected explicitly for the task at hand. We offer both. Although our iSpecimen Marketplace is optimized for procurement from existing inventories around the world, we often arrange prospective custom collection of new biospecimens…

Although you can learn a lot from cancerous tissue, you can learn even more when you have patient data to put the biology in context. That’s why one iSpecimen client, a U.S. cancer research and diagnostic company, recently ordered longitudinal patient information from iSpecimen to complement its request for ovarian cancer tissue specimens. The company…

Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection diagnosed in roughly 330,000 Americans every year, becomes a heightened concern in June and July, especially for people in the Northeast and upper Midwest, where the disease is concentrated. Early diagnosis and treatment with antibiotics, however, usually means a rapid and complete recovery. Our June Specimen Spotlight features a set of…